Question

I have a dictionary in the following format where I don’t know the number of lines or items I’m going to receive:

{'line(0).item1':'a', 'line(0).item2':'34', 
 'line(1).item1':'sd', 'line(1).item2':'2', 'line(1).item3':'fg', 
 'line(2).item1':'f' ... }

What is the most pythonic way to parse this into a list of dictionaries in the following format:

[{'item1':'a', 'item2':'34'}, 
 {'item1':'sd', 'item2':'2', 'item3':'fg'}, 
 {'item1':'f',...}, ...]

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

d = {'line(0).item1':'a' ...}

out = collections.defaultdict(list)
for k,v in d.items():
    n,val = re.findall(r'^line\((\d+)\)\.(\w+)$', k)[0]
    out[int(n)].append((val,v))

my_list = [dict(out[v]) for v in sorted(out)]

and the output will be the expected:

[{'item2': '34', 'item1': 'a'}, {'item2': '2', 'item3': 'fg', 'item1': 'sd'}, {'item1': 'f'}]